In 1981, the Brazilian writer Moacyr Scliar published a novella, Max and the Cats, about a young man stuck in a lifeboat with a panther. In 2002, the Canadian writer Yann Martel won the Man Booker Prize for his bestselling Life of Pi, about a young man stuck in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. Martel didn’t have to worry that his appropriation would be discovered. He preemptively tattled on himself, thanking Scliar “for the spark of life” in an author’s note and confessing, in an interview with the Guardian, “I remember thinking, man, that’s a brilliant premise” upon reading a review of Scliar’s book.
When Dr. Scliar, literary Brazil, and The New York Times finally took notice, punishment was swift and severe. No, not really. Scliar, though baffled by Martel, declined to pursue legal action. Martel persevered in his delusional belief that what he’d done was something other than a staggering embarrassment. Just last year, Ang Lee turned Martel’s pseudo-spiritual pabulum into a 3-D blockbuster. And somewhere, Martel’s fellow mega-bestselling huckster Paulo Coelho was watching and taking notes.
São Paulo’s latest is Manuscript Found in Accra.1 It should have been called Manuscript Found in Hudson News. Only a surpassingly subtle mind could divine the difference between Coelho’s book and Kahlil Gibran’s ubiquitous self-help tract The Prophet, which since its first publication in 1923 has never been out of print. Gibran is, among poets, reportedly third in sales only
